Emma Olson

My Olivia holds the box out in front of my nose. It is grey (though Olivia has called it brown before) and made up of plastic lines. It is a good thing. A good box. I like the nose box.

“Muzzle,” she says, and without hesitation, I duck forward and press my face into the box, holding it while she counts. “One, two, three, four, five.” We are up to five now, sometimes. During practice. When I have to wear the box for real, it’s a kind of forever. But that’s okay. It always comes off eventually.

When she gets to five, I shove my nose a bit further in. I like to do this for emphasis — to show that I know what to do, and because sometimes it makes Olivia laugh. She takes the box away, and then I get to eat my treat. We are doing little pieces of stick cheese today. I love stick cheese.

Back before, I used to eat the treats through the holes in the box, while it was on my face. This was because I didn’t like to wear the box. But now it’s okay, so I eat the treat when it’s all done. I slap my paw at Olivia’s arm, and she laughs again, and for maybe just because, she gives me another piece of stick cheese.

She and Olivia are the same person, but sometimes she is called she, and sometimes she is called Olivia. Sometimes she is called You, or Lia. Sometimes she is called things in a loud way that make me hide, and my ears hurt.

Not so much anymore, but I am still afraid sometimes.

Something creaks, and I am flying toward the front door, barking before I even fully register where the sound is coming from.

I am barking and I am barking. I can barely even see where I am going, throwing myself at the door. I can smell smoke and iron and sweat. I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know if I am running toward or away. It feels like the time with all the sand and the big water and running into it only to realize it is much bigger than I had thought big water could be.

I am stuck there for a moment. It smells like my own fear. It smells like a person shaped like my fear: big and hulking. Someone who yells and makes Olivia cry. Someone who makes me hide.

And then, I’m being dragged backward, an arm around my middle. Into Olivia’s arms I go, and I try to keep going, wriggling for a moment before being enveloped in solid warmth. I breathe, burrowing in her arms.

I don’t want to be Bad Dog. I don’t.

When I catch my breath, and Olivia has pushed several pieces of cheese into my mouth to calm me, I am put back down. My claws click on the wood floor as I creep back toward the front door for a second look. To make sure. Olivia says it’s okay, but I have to be sure.

I snuffle at the space underneath the door. I smell grass. Dandelions. That space right before the rain starts coming down from the great above. But I don’t smell the smoke, or the iron, or the sweat.

I had been so sure, but now I don’t know.

Olivia calls me, and I reluctantly let my search go, clicking back to her with my tail low and apologetic. It’s sometimes a bit embarrassing, getting all worked up like that, all for nothing. This is not the first time. It happens a lot, actually.

“It’s okay, Picky,” she says, kneeling down and scratching at my ears. I sigh and lean in. “I know. It’s okay. Getting used to a new house is hard for all of us.”

I push my nose into her hand. The thumping in my chest is less and less.

“Especially after….” She frowns, then smiles down at me. I whine and wag. I know what she means. I pretty much always do. I know we are different, of course, but we always know what the other is trying to say. Always.

She’s upset about the house. It is new. To us, at least. It smells like a million years, and cats. A lot of them. It smells, and I think that’s why Olivia is sad. Now there’s only one cat, but she’s ours. She’s the most upset out of all of us, I think, hiding upstairs and swatting at my paws when I go by. But like my Olivia says, it’s hard for all of us.

                                                       —

My Olivia is called Olivia, and I am called Pickles. Sometimes people laugh when she tells them that. I’m usually barking when this happens, and this will sometimes make them laugh harder. It scares me when they laugh. It’s at this point that I run and hide.

Sometimes I am called Picky, but only by Olivia. Sometimes I am called The Dog in the loud way that makes me scared.

Or worse, Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Not for some time, but I don’t know how much. Time is weird for me.

After the issue at the front door, Olivia asks if I want to go outside. This brightens me up right away, and I burst forth to the door at the back of the house. I jump up, barking and slapping my paws at it. It’s a different bark, and Olivia knows exactly what I mean.

This is how it works—we communicate, and we know.

I am very tall and big, of course. But even so, when I stretch all the way up, I am still not quite at the ball that pulls the door open. I try every time, and every time I have to wait for Olivia to come do it for me. I will get it one day, I’m sure. This is a new house, after all, and I will need to practice.

We run around in the grass, and I chase my squeaking toys that Olivia throws. One looks like a mouse, and one looks like a bunny. Sometimes, just for a moment, I think they are real. But then I remember that it’s just pretend.

                                                       —

I am curled in a ball underneath the weighty blanket that I sometimes almost get trapped in when it happens again. I am in a dream, I think, and I smell the smoke. It’s not like fire smoke, not really. I’ve smelled that when the next-door people at the before house would set it in their yard, just to look at. I don’t like that either, but this is different. This is earthier, like rolling around in the dirt. Or a dead animal, but not fun.

I get tangled in the blanket, barking and growling, and that’s when I realize I’m awake. My hair sticks at all ends, and all I want is to bite. I scramble free from the bed, throwing myself to the floor, crashing into the door that stays cracked for Kitty to come and go.

I’m already out in the hall when Olivia calls for me from back there. “What are you doing?” she asks. I falter, breathing hard, and feeling comes back down to my paws. She doesn’t come get me. I stand there, in the hall, and she doesn’t come get me.

“What the fuck, Pickles,” she growls. “I’m never going to get back to sleep now.”

I look back at the empty doorway, to where I had pushed the door all the way open, not even feeling it when I ran through. Olivia doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t call me back to bed.

I sniff idly at the ground, at a stray tumbleweed of my own fur. It smells like me. Kitty slinks by somewhere in the shadows, and I watch her twist her way up the stairs. She is independent in a way I can’t be.

There’s nothing else out here. I can’t smell the smoke.

But Olivia doesn’t call me back, so I lie down out in the hallway, tucking my nose under my hindleg. I fall asleep eventually, I think, and I don’t dream.

                                                       —

When the light starts coming in through the windows, everything is better. It pools over me, warming the fur at my back. I love laying in the warm light, and I bask there for a bit. When Olivia comes out of her room, it’s like nothing happened at all. I trot to her, and she scratches my ears and neck. All better.

She goes and gets my leash. I know it before I see it because of the jangle it does. This is our routine for Morning Walk; I can hardly contain myself, nearly running out of my skin. I go pee, and then I sniff and sniff until I’ve caught up on everything that’s happened since the time before. We zig and zag through the grass. It’s new grass, different from what we had at the before house. It’s been days and days here now, so many, I think, but I’m still learning the way.

I find that I’m trying to smell parts of the before house, the before yard. I think I almost can—and then I’m running to the end of the leash, and my neck hurts and I’m falling backward. I can’t tell if the sound inside me is a real thing—a warning that I am big and brave—or if it’s only the thunder inside my chest that hurts when it goes too hard.

There was movement, across the street, and I’m trying to run toward it again. The sound inside me is worse and worse. One of the rumbling beasts whooshes past in the road, and Olivia’s holding me back, grabbing me around my front.

When the beast passes, I see that it’s a someone on the other side, one of Olivia’s kind. I thought I had seen a different kind of someone, but now that’s gone, and I can’t remember.

We’re almost there—Olivia says so—and she tugs me along. I’m trying to look back, to see if I can see what I thought I’d seen. To see if I can remember. But the idea is gone. It’s just a someone, and I don’t know who I thought I saw.

We go to the box with all the papers. Olivia shuffles through them, and I feel her tense through the leash. It is a tether between us, and I can feel what she feels. I feel her not breathing. Her not breathing makes my breathing speed up.

But then she shakes it off, and I shake it off, and we walk home.

                                                      —

I am not so good with time. But that same thing happened—it must have been this next day or the next. I was asleep one moment, and the next I was leaping off the bed, a deep rumbling in my chest like the beasts in the road. It just kept going and going. I was out in the hall before Olivia was able to wake up enough to call. When I came back to myself fully, I was tucked up under the bottom stair, shivering. Smoke in my nose. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The front door, upstairs; I didn’t know.

It happened again, and one more time. And then one night, Olivia went to bed and shut the door behind her, leaving me out in the hall. The wood floor was cold that night. That was last night, I think. I’m lying on the blue rug with the fuzzies on it by the big window in the couch room. Olivia is talking, but not to me. She has the screen box, and she’s talking into it when she drops down onto the couch. I resist the impulse to go to her. A shiver runs through me, and I don’t know why.

“No he’s never bitten anyone,” Olivia is saying into the screen box. “He’s just…sensitive. Takes time to warm up to people.” She is crying, quiet, but I can hear. I can smell the salt in her tears. “I just don’t think I’m what he needs,” she says, and the words dissolve into a sob.

I don’t really know what she’s talking about. I’m realizing that her words can be hard sometimes. I must have known this. It seems obvious now. I thought for so long that we understood everything we said to each other. Now I don’t know.

Instead, my tail wicks back and forth without me telling it to. It’s very upsetting to see someone cry, especially my Olivia. I would normally go up on the couch, shove my nose under her arm. Something holds me back now, and so instead, I release a whine from my own chest to match the one from hers.

                                                      —

Night again. My body is pressed up against the crack under Olivia’s closed door. She is crying to herself, no longer trying to keep the sound inside.

We have not done practice with my nose box in a long time. No tricks either. I usually love to, and she does, too. I’ve tried. Tried to show her sitting, or going up on my hind paws, or spinning and spinning in circles until I’m dizzy. She doesn’t smile like she used to.

Nights are long. They have been getting longer, I think. They used to pass so quickly when I would be under the weighty blanket with Olivia.

I try really, really hard not to bark. To be as quiet as a ball of my own fallen fur, sitting in the corner of the room.

Someone has been talking to me at night. It says bad dog. Bad dog. The voice is coming from inside my own head.

                                                      —

I think Olivia’s going to the paper box without me. I sit at the door and whine. She must hear me because she comes back after a few minutes, instead of walking and walking like we do together. She’s not as excited as me, and when I jump against her legs, she brushes me off.

There’s a paper in her hands, and they are shaking. She’s clutching it so hard, and the sound hurts in my ears. It falls and I trot over to look. There are shapes and lines, and I can’t read. I shred it into tiny, tiny pieces. I think I swallow some of it.

She’s in the kitchen afterwards, sitting and eating one of my stick cheeses, staring at something I can’t see. She’s talking, not to the screen box, but for some reason, I don’t think she’s talking to me either. “I don’t know why he won’t leave me alone.”

I sit at her feet and paw at her leg. When she looks down, her eyes are wet and she shakes her head.

“No, Picky.” Her voice is fragile and crackly.

I don’t know what it means.

                                                      —

Something is happening, and I don’t like it. Olivia has put me behind a gate at the top of the stairs. “I just can’t sleep with you right there,” she said before she went back down. I can still hear her crying. I can hear her talking to someone.

“Yes, I can bring him in the morning. Ten AM. And you’re sure he’ll be okay? He’s a good dog.” She is crying. I can hear muffled sound, gone rattley from the screen box. “Yes, I understand. No guarantees.”

She and the screen box go quiet, and then there is endless night.

I am awoken by a sound. Or a smell. Or both, or neither. I don’t know what is real anymore these days. My nose is pressed up between the bars of the gate, and I try to concentrate. Try to find what it was I was sensing.

I’m hit by the smell of earthy smoke. Leather, sweat. Anger. The hair at the back of my scruff prickles. It’s different this time. This time, the smell of it all isn’t coming from inside my own head, inside my own nose. This is outside. This is real.

I let out one sharp bark, panic ruffling its way through me. I don’t know what to do. I push against the gate, and it holds. I bark again, something rumbling inside me. I try to yell for Olivia, to tell her something is wrong. But we don’t speak the same language, and maybe we never have.

It doesn’t matter, though. We don’t need the same language. She’s still my Olivia. I’ve done this before, once, when I was younger and more brave. I put my paws up, stretching until they reach the top of the gate, pushing off with my back legs, scrambling up and up. I’m up, balanced perfectly on top for one, glorious moment, and then I’m falling.

I think I yelp when I hit the stairs, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. I smell the smoke and the sweat. It’s that man. The one who made Olivia cry. The one who kicked me and pulled me by my scruff. He’s here, and he’s real this time.

My body hurts, but I’m barreling down the rest of the stairs, barks and growls flooding out of me. There’s talking coming from Olivia’s room, but it barely registers. I’m scrambling in. No time to consider. No time to be afraid.

All I smell is the smoke and the fear. I can barely see. Olivia yells, and I charge forward until my teeth make contact with shoes. I don’t even recognize the snarl that comes out of me. It scares me, but there’s no time for that.

He is yelling things in the loud way. My ears hurt, and all I want to do is run and hide. But I hold on, biting once. Then again. On his ankle, I bite down. He wrenches free, and I am kicked. I hear and feel myself yelp, but then I am back at him, dragging him by his leg. He is very heavy, and I am very small. I know this now. It is something I haven’t quite known, but I do now.

Olivia scrambles behind me, out the door. She’s talking. Shouting.

Everything is so loud, and it doesn’t stop.

                                                      —

The man in the now house is called Jackson. He is sometimes called Jack, or No, or Please Don’t. Me and my Olivia lived with him, once, in the before house. That was before now, before here.

Out of all the people I have seen, he is the one who laughed the most at me. Who would poke at me and pull my tail. He laughed when he did this. He laughed when Olivia got so sad or mad that she cried.

“Bad dog,” he liked to say. He liked to say this, and he liked to steal things from me. He would put his hand in my food and then yell when I told him to stop.

It is okay now, and he is gone. Olivia tells me that he will be gone for a long time. I hope a long time is forever.

Things are normal, and they are good. I sleep under the weighty blanket at night, and we practice with my nose box a lot. We walk to the paper box, and Olivia gives me all the ones she doesn’t like, and I shred them into bits.

I never smell the smoke anymore, or the sweat, or the fear, or him. I am good with that, and I am happy.

I know now that I am very small. I can’t reach the opening ball on the door, and I never will. I know now that me and Olivia are not the same, and we don’t talk the same. Sometimes I think it would be best or easiest if we did. But we try our best, and most of the time, it is good enough.